When Gratitude Does Not Lead to Well-being

Homaira Kabir is a positive psychology practitioner currently working in Muscat, Oman. She inspires and supports women to live engaged and fulfilled lives of purpose and well-being. She also enables adolescents to harness the brilliance of their age through programs in middle school. She is a writer whose work has appeared in media around the world. She is currently completing her MAPP from UEL.
Web site. Full bio pending. Homaira's articles for Positive Psychology News are here. She plans to write monthly on the 7th.

My youngest had not had the best day at school. Over the course of the evening, her unhappiness with her friends had turned into a string of complaints about everything she didn’t have.

I knew that she needed to empty her heart to reconnect with her head. But I just wasn’t finding the time to sit with her and hold the space while she did so. I wish I’d just dropped everything and turned towards her, but isn’t hindsight always 20/20?

So the misery prolonged until bedtime. As I bent down to kiss her glum face, I tried to rub sense into her by giving her some perspective.

“Honey, its time you think about the millions of little children who don’t have the privileged life you do.”

“Its not my fault that they don’t, and don’t try to make me feel bad about it,” came an angry response that threw me off. Too tired to argue with an equally tired child, I said goodnight and left the room.

She dragged her way to school the next morning. But she came back home chirping and singing. She’d made up with her friends, and life couldn’t be better! I forgot about the whole incident, but then it came back up in my mind a few days later.

I guess I still needed to learn my lesson.

I was with a client, and the topic of gratitude came up. She was describing the amazing gratitude of her parents, who had managed to focus on the good even when they lost a daughter. I was in awe of their strength.

But as the session wore on, I began to realize how their gratitude had adversely affected my client. From her story, it seemed as though they had used it as a defense mechanism to deal with the intense emotions they would indeed have felt, a kind of “selective neglect” as Dan Siegel describes it. Although it’s a time-honored strategy to calm the insatiable demands of dopaminergic pathways, perhaps they were simply avoiding a deep pain they were too fearful to face.

Having lived a life garbed in gratitude, my client had silenced an important part of her being, and hence deprived herself of the ability to feel, understand, or express her own emotions. She had become a stranger in her own skin.

It’s true that when our heart aches, an intellectual understanding does little to bring our full selves to life. Positive emotions, whether gratitude or cognitive empathy, remain static knowledge unless they enter every part of our physical being and transform into lived experience. Because our bodies influence our minds, paying mindful attention to our emotions is essential for well-being.

There was my lesson. What my child needed was my attunement to help her make sense of her emotions. By shushing them down with a glassful of gratitude, I was simply shirking my responsibility. I’m glad she refused to take my offering because it didn’t “feel” right. She wasn’t ready, and she let me know. I need to honor that, so that she preserves her wholeness and maintains her capacity for inner connection.

This is where the true magic of gratitude comes alive. Bob Emmons describes it as a construct of two components: an affirmation of goodness and the recognition of where that goodness comes from. As such, it’s also a social strength, but only when embodied. As Barbara Fredrickson says, “When your mind and body are infused with good feelings, those feelings lift and expand your chest, a subtle nonverbal gesture that makes you more inviting to others, more open for connection.”

My client had missed out on this. An intellectual understanding of gratitude had not imbued her with the benefits of what openhearted appreciation felt like. She was grateful for everything she had, and yet lived life in a lonely cocoon. I could finally help her make sense of her current life.

I’ve thought about this many times since: Does wisdom really come with age? Or is it something that we’re born with, lose, and spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim?

If a large part of wisdom is indeed inner connection, we need to be better guardians of our children’s emotions.

2 comments

Terrific article with wondrous perspective. It reminded me of Todd Kashdan’s book with Robert Biswas-Diener, “The Upside of Your Dark Side”. Where our negative emotions need to be felt, accepted and then we move forward.

I think your daughter is an old soul. She knew a spoonful of sugar, or positive psychology (PP) gratitude (not to sell that short!) was not what she needed at the time. Yes, she may already have wisdom. Some kids blow me away with their precociousness and wisdom early on. Others like me needed to learn it the hard way. I was rigid as a kid and a perfectionist and was never good enough for my boyfriend’s parents, the country club set. I let that color my soul in gray. It took me years to wise up to my own appropriate, self-affirming self-talk. I hope I am still gaining wisdom, and I hope I do in an open flexible way till I travel the great beyond.

Your wisdom here, your noticing and being aware one size does not fit all in PP applications is right on. Great for every coach and psychologist to remember. I will share your article with the PP class I am presently teaching for MentorCoach. Can’t wait to hear their opinions. Well done, dear Homaira!

This beautifully written article, and your daughter, really point to the need to acknowledge and honor our feelings with mind, body, and spirit before adopting any form of placation, and we need to allow others the same process. I was reading quickly and perceived “garbed in gratitude” as “garbled in gratitude” at first, thinking that made perfect sense as well. As PP practitioners, we can be easily misunderstood, so articles like this go a long way toward grounding gratitude and other approaches in attuned practicality.

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